I'm Not There

    Hey, Kid!  What are you doing? As we all know, the 1980's was a fertile time for horror films.  We had great original movies like An American Werewolf in London as well as a bunch of sequels and remakes.  Freddy and Jason were arguably the "favorite" children of the 1980's and we also got a Psycho sequel for some reason.  Fright Night is an original movie that spawned a sequel and a reboot but the 1985 original is predictable and falls a little flat.  Essentially, a kid named Charley Brewster realizes his neighbor Jerry is a murdering vampire and enlists the help of his friends Edward and Amy and for some reason, a horror host names Peter Vincent. That's it, the whole movie is them battling the vampire with some close calls until he inevitably turns Amy and a big fight ensues where he die s. Looking at this movie now (with 2020 vision, get it?), it just feels plain goofy. This is not necessarily a bad thing, a lot of movies during this time ...

  The absence of love is the most abject pain. The scariest part of Nosferatu the Vampyre by far,   was the opening shots of mummified babies and whatever the hell Gollum is.  Interestingly enough, these mummies are very real and located in Guanajuato. Mexico.  A long way from Transylvania, but still strange why a vampire would decide to keep all these dried up and leathery cadavers around after drying them of blood.  To deter intruders for decor?  Freak.  The rest of the film is not so much scary but rather wonderfully composed.  I will posit that the reason the film is not centered on scares is that we already know the story of Nosferatu and Dracula.  By 1979, there had been many iterations of Bram Stoker's  story projected on the screen.  Speaking of Stoker, the copyright to his novel Dracula  had at this point expired and so Werner Herzog could use the names of Dracula, Harker and Lucy without having to ...

  Smilers never lose and frowners never win. After doing this for eleven years, I'm still learning a lot about film, life and myself.  It's really surprising that it took me this long to remember not to eat while screening these movies.  Last night, this was engrained in me forever after watching The Autopsy of Jane Doe.  The opening scene we get shots of pretty grizzly corpses that made me put away my pizza for a little bit.  It reminded me of that time when I was eating a delicious turkey sandwich and then I saw the opening scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I haven't had a Ralph's sandwich since.   In any event, this movie was suggested to me by a Buffalo and it's probably one of the best  horror/thrillers I've screened. I would call this movie "Hitchcockian" in its masterful control of suspense.  We start out with  so many questions, trying to piece together a gruesome crime scene, imagining the scariest and worst scenario...

  Baby Diaper Not even going to bury the lead on this one, T he Terror of Hallow's Eve  was powerfully disappointing. It had so much potential and it all fell apart in the end.  It's like when your kid plays soccer and during practice, he's fast and scores a couple goals but when the game comes around, he keeps getting off sides and gets hit in the face when he tries to attempt a header.  You know the potential is there but he just keeps blowing it, he or she, whichever is worse.  Anyway, it's not clear if there were production difficulties or the budget ran out but the end result is similar to three different movies frankensteined together to make a thing.  The main reason this is so disappointing is because the movie starts pretty solid.  Cinematically it pulls you in to the story of a kid who is suspiciously good at making monsters and practical effects but misses his father and is bullied.  We also get a cameo from Eri...

  You don't want no smoke with the BX. As soon as I heard a movie called Vampires Vs the Bronx was being released I was all in for two reasons.  First, it is reminiscent of kid centric horror movie sub-genre of the 1980's such as The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys and even The Goonies and guess what?  I am there for it.  Secondly, I am Bodega Hive and will support The Kid Mero to keep the brand strong.  Ah ah ah!  This movie ended up being a delightfully entertaining experience that were it not for some profanity, would be fun for the whole family.  If you trust your 4 year old to hear the occasional "F" and "S" words without repeating it in pre-school then you good fam.   The story deals with a lot of businesses in the Bronx being bought out by a company that goes by the name of Murnau Properties.  Now, when I saw this, it took me out of the movie a little because it was too on the nose.  As a reminder from our f...